How to Increase Website Traffic

There are many creative ways to increase traffic to your website. As long as you're creating good, original content, you should see a natural increase in traffic. If you want to help it along, there are lots of things you can do to give yourself a boost.

Write articles rich in content. Quality articles will get ranked better in search results. Make sure that your articles address the needs of your readers, and that they can find all of the information they need in one spot. This is the most effective means for increasing traffic to a website; offering people something that they cannot obtain elsewhere, or at least, not to the level of quality that you are offering it.^[1]

• Create content that is helpful and useful. Simply cobbling together information from another website will not generate traffic. You need to offer visitors the information they need to achieve a goal, solve a problem, be entertained, find out quality news, or just have a good laugh.
• Avoid content generators. While these were once the delight of a fledgling web industry, they are no longer useful. Putting your own team's creativity online is what is useful.
• Never copy and paste from another website - Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines are too smart for this nowadays and will detect copied and unoriginal content, sending you to the bottom of the pile.

Build good links. Link building is incredibly important for websites. This is the process of creating links that point to your page from other pages. This will happen naturally as you create quality content, but there are some things you can do to help build links yourself:

• Trading links with other websites that are closely related to the subject of your website can bring you more website traffic. These are two-way links because you must provide a link to them, too, and linking to low-quality websites can threaten the credibility of yours. Only link to sites that are dead on topic, and truly help your visitors.
• Link back on related blogs and forums. Find communities that relate to your niche and create a user profile there. Enter in your site information in your profile and make quality posts. This will draw people to your site through your profile links.
• Contact companies that relate to your niche. Getting a company to link to your site for a how-to article, or a blog post related to their product, can significantly increase your traffic. Try to build some links with companies in your niche.
• Set up an RSS feed. An RSS feed allows your articles to be easily linked in a variety of other places. Submitting your RSS feed to directories can really give your links a boost.
• See this guide for more details on building back links.

Develop good headlines. Headlines are the first thing readers see, and are typically the only thing they see if the article is shared. Your headlines should jump out at the reader and quickly draw their attention. A good headline can dramatically increase your views when shared on a social network.

• See this guide for a detailed breakdown of what makes an effective headline.

Write articles rich in content. Quality articles will get ranked better in search results. Make sure that your articles address the needs of your readers, and that they can find all of the information they need in one spot. This is the most effective means for increasing traffic to a website; offering people something that they cannot obtain elsewhere, or at least, not to the level of quality that you are offering it.^[1]

• Create content that is helpful and useful. Simply cobbling together information from another website will not generate traffic. You need to offer visitors the information they need to achieve a goal, solve a problem, be entertained, find out quality news, or just have a good laugh.
• Avoid content generators. While these were once the delight of a fledgling web industry, they are no longer useful. Putting your own team's creativity online is what is useful.
• Never copy and paste from another website - Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines are too smart for this nowadays and will detect copied and unoriginal content, sending you to the bottom of the pile.

Give freebies. Who doesn't like a freebie?! Online freebies are commonplace and they leave the visitor wanting more when they are well written and informative introductory materials. Consider such freebies as:

• Giving away an eBook with your ad on it. Allow your visitors to also give the freebie away. This will increase your ad exposure and increase web traffic to your website at the same time;
• Holding free online classes or seminars. They could be held in your website's chat room. The idea of "live" information will definitely entice people to visit your website. You will become known as an expert on the topic.
• Giving visitors a free entry into your contest or sweepstakes. The prizes should be something of interest or value to your visitors. Most people who enter will continually revisit your web site to get the results.
• Letting visitors download free software such as freeware, shareware, demos etc. You could even turn part of your site into a free software directory. If you created the software, include your ad inside and let other people give it away.
• Targeting specific groups who might worry about using the internet with free classes in using it on your site - senior citizens, busy workers etc. might find these convenient and alluring.
• Offering free online services or utilities from your website. For instance, they could be search engine submitting, copyrighting, proofreading etc. The service or utility should be helpful to your target audience.
• Giving free consulting to people who visit your website. You could offer your knowledge via e-mail or by telephone. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive.
• Offering a free start-up package that has a finite time; enough time for the customer to practice with your online product and like it enough to pay for continued use.
• Sending out free CDs, DVDs etc. that contain starter packs or teasers to encourage the customer to use your site more.
• Offering free screensavers or templates for business cards, cards, writing paper etc., anything that a customer can print out.

Use calls to action. Ask your readers to get involved. If the readers feel like the site owner is interested in them, they will be more likely to continue coming back. Calls to action engage the reader, and helps keep them on the page. Calls to action may include asking the reader to write in with responses, sound off in the comments, or visit a site.